It is always interesting to see how Internet usage in Ireland changes over time. The latest update from Alexa.com suggests that while search is still the number one utility used by Irish net surfers, social interaction is the next most popular activity.

When was the last time you checked out eircom.net?

Of the top 20 most popular websites in Ireland, eleven are principally focused on user-generated content and conversations – I’m including eBay and Daft in this category. Facebook has now passed out Bebo as the most popular Irish social network and I’m noticing Twitter in the top 20 for the first time at number 15.

A really interesting change is that there is now only one corporate website, AIB bank, in the top 20. In the past you would typically see the Irish airlines, Aer Lingus and Ryanair in particular here in the top 20. They are now ranked 31 and 40 respectively.

Another change of note is the relegation of Eircom.net from its position as one of Ireland’s most popular websites for the first ten years of the Internet. For much of that time it served many as the gateway to the world wide web but now finds itself in 30th place – just one spot behind a porn website.

Finally, Bing, the brand new search engine from Microsoft, comes in at number 26 and presumably is the one to watch over the coming months.

[…] 24% of the Most Popular Websites in Ireland are Irish I wrote a post recently identifying the top websites that Irish people are visiting these days. Now Fergal was wondering which were the top Irish-owned websites and in fairness […]

Thanks for the comment Michele. You’re in a better position to judge this than I am, but I think there is a fairly credible story being told there by Alexa in what I’ve highlighted. I’ll pick up the discussion in the comments on the later post so as not to confuse things.

Hi Brendan, I’ve used Alexa and ‘top100irishsites’ for example to find guideline rankings of overall top Irish sites.
Where do I look to find a list of, say, the top 100 TRAVEL sites viewed by Irish people?

Hiya Brian. We had a discussion about Alexa on a later blog post and figured out that Google Ad Planner is an alternative source of information on top websites. You can do a bit more digging around there too. I reckon there’s a 20% or so margin of error on Googles stats though.